Visitations: Poems

Julia Alvarez returns to her first love, poetry, in her latest collection, with scintillating poems drawn from all the seasons of her life, from childhood to the years of silver.

“Visitations is a cause for celebration. The first book of poems by Julia Alvarez in over twenty years braids miracles and mourning, infused with the compassion that characterizes all the work of this resplendent writer.” —Martín Espada, National Book Award-winning author of Jailbreak of Sparrows

In these poems, Alvarez traces her life gently, a fingertip following lines on a page, through memories of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, a dictatorship dramatically survived, the smells of sancocho and sofrito, the formative influence of her tías and her sisters, her move to America and the challenges of learning English, the search for mental health and beauty, redemption and success. We meet her grandchild and her mother, her lovers, visit the homes where she grew up and the homes where she grew into the formidable writer read in thousands of classrooms across America today. Her wisdom is as clear and beautiful as the light that shines through glass and yet grounded through the form and substance of self-knowing.

Told with a storyteller’s intimacy and the comfort of a warm hearth, this is a master writer’s reflection on family, aging, love, the body, having a voice, and the very act of composing poetry itself, experienced across the arc of decades—a collection of searching for an artistic voice, for the author’s very essence, until, “the way it sometimes happens: we arrive / where we were promised, belong to / what we longed for in ourselves, each other.”